The Next Three Years

Election Day is now behind us. I appreciate the vote of confidence I received from the voters of New Port Richey.

We have accomplished a lot during the past three years, but there is a lot of work ahead for us to tackle during the next three years. In many ways, the next three years will be more challenging, simply because we’ve already addressed many of the “easy to fix” issues. Fixing these more challenging issues will take both hard work and money.

In no particular order these are some of the biggest challenges we will face:

Downtown Parking – We will need a parking garage sooner rather than later. Downtown parking lots are filling up on a regular basis and overflow parking in places like the old Baptist Church property is going away. We need to move on the proposed parking garage before things get critical.

Residential Streets – The ill-fated plan that our staff came up with last summer went down in flames because it wasn’t fair. Our pavement management committee, composed of city residents, should be coming to us with new recommendations soon. The trick is going to be to get all of the residential streets on a repaving schedule that will results in all of these streets being repaved on a 20 year cycle and spreading the cost out over the same time frame. Whether or not to include alleys in this plan also needs to be discussed.

Annexation – We need to take a look at annexing enclaves (eg. Leisure Lane/Van Doren) as well as other areas neighboring the city to smooth out the city boundaries. Annexation may well help both in eliminating crime hot spots just outside of the city limits and increasing our property tax base.

Traffic enforcement – It is a foregone conclusion that the red light cameras are going to go away. The only question is when. There is a concern that accidents will go up once the cameras come down. Additionally, we have an issue of speeding and distracted driving that effects both the commercial and residential areas of the city. We don’t have a formal traffic enforcement division within our police department. It may be time to look at forming one. In the mean time, you will see periodic speed checks like the one I saw Saturday afternoon.

Exterior challenges – The legislature has been extraordinarily busy considering laws that would chip away at the ability of cities to make their own rules on a variety of issues. Additionally, there are some at the county level who would like to take the TIF money that comes to our Community Redevelopment Agency and use it for other parts of the county instead of for fixing up New Port Richey. We will need to make it clear that the citizens of New Port Richey want to control their own destiny.

I look forward to serving as your Mayor for the next three years. These are exciting times for New Port Richey.

Comments

One–accidents of one type may go up when the cameras are removed, but that is unlikely and statistically irrelevant because the cameras statewide were not reducing impacts, and were possibly increasing the injury rates. Less fatalities, yes, but more major injuries. The cameras should have come down years ago, though I understand the motivation of financials. Just because the city pulls in revenue though, doesn’t make it the right thing to do.

Also, is there any information on how many more spaces are needed downtown? You and I have talked many times about parking, and I have still yet to hear anyone address an idea to put diagonal spaces along Central where it is at its widest near Orange Circle. That would be at least 100+ spaces. Is the capacity so bad that 100 additional spaces wouldn’t be sufficient for at least the next year? It’s also an immediate solution and EXTREMELY low cost… just add paint and a 4 way stop on Adams ($2,000 max). Why aren’t we exploring this first? In fact, why not do it next month to alleviate issues that are happening right now?

Further, make downtown more walkable–we have a huge grid system of streets on which visitors could park and walk/ride. We would have essentially unlimited parallel parking up wider streets like Montana (which would help with issues like speeding that we have on that street). There are many other streets where that would work as well.

I suggested a “Walkable Streets” initiative that was shut down by a skeptical (and close-minded) LDRB without any suggestions for improvements or alternatives. Close a few streets to vehicle traffic and open it up to only golf carts, bikes, and pedestrians–you would make it extremely easy to traverse the city on a bike. That would also alleviate some parking issues–especially from residents like myself that feel the need to drive the 10 blocks because it’s unsafe to ride without any bike lanes and in a vehicle dominated city.

I believe that the cameras would already be gone, were it not for the contract between the city and the camera company. With all but a fraction of the ticket amount going to the state and the camera company, the financial incentive to keep the cameras is not what you might think. The cameras HAVE been successful in dealing with drivers who think that a light turning yellow in the distance means “floor it”.

A parking structure would potentially bring in 200-300 new spaces. The Swanson lot holds about 100 cars. Years ago, the lot was almost always empty and there was no problem closing some or most of it for a special event, eg. this coming weekend’s car show. The lot is now full on a daily basis. The old Baptist Church lot holds something close to 50 cars. It also fills up whenever anything is going on in the park. That space will disappear when the first apartments go up on the property. Streetscaping proposed for the west end of Central would appear to preclude diagonal parking on the stretch between Adams and Circle. Parallel parking along Central east of there is already common practice. I doubt the residential property owners there would appreciate diagonal parking in front of their homes. There is an issue now with finding parking south of Main Street. See Kelly’s comment for details. It is my understanding that the owner of the lot across the street from the Hacienda is looking at developing the property. That would kill parking there during events. The Hacienda is likely two years from opening and needing additional parking. All of these together point to the need to locate several hundred new spaces. Some may come from diagonal parking and striping out parking on wide streets near the downtown, but I believe that some are going to have to come from a parking structure.

I wasn’t at the LDRB meeting, so I can’t address their view of walkable streets. I can tell you that the citizens group that met at the Rec. Center a couple of months back was VERY interested and discussed converting at least one two way street into a one way street with an expanded space for bicycles and pedestrians. There have been ongoing discussions since then on how that might work.

I’d expand on all of this more, but I’ve run out of time this morning. These are definitely topics that we need to explore further.

The library expansion is on the radar, but waiting on the fire department relocation. As recently as yesterday, I talked to the city manager about potential sites for the new fire station that would free up the area behind the library.

I support coming up with a parking plan. We often have guests coming in that tell us they had to drive around for 20 minutes to find a space in a 3 block radius of our store. So I would love to see a solution for this.

Speeding is definitely an issue in the downtown. Cars fly north on Grand toward Main. But a bigger problem than that, the illegal U-turns that happen multiple times a day in front of my building. I wish the street wasn’t so wide there. I wish we could take out the center turn lane, make it 2 way traffics, push out the parallel spots 4 feet on both sides of the street, and widen the sidewalks by 4 feet. Then we could have the required four feet clearance to have outside seating in front of our building. That would help attract interest on the street and possibly help draw additional foot traffic.

I know that’s a lot but it’s a dream.

Had I been able to make the meeting about the downtown landscaping, I would have suggested that they pull the trees up in front of my building, don’t replace them, and cement in the openings (which would make the access on the sidewalk enough for outside dining too).

I want to drive more traffic here and I really feel that with more on the street, we can do that. Call me crazy, and call it a hunch, but I feel the way about this like I did about the possibility of successful tea room downtown 🙂

I can think of several streets that might well benefit from “road diets”. Grand Blvd between the downtown and the bridge is a perfect example of a road that is vastly too wide for the traffic on it. That space could better be used for pedestrians and cyclists. Thanks for sending me the report you produced a few years back with the Environmental Committee. Definitely food for thought.

Thank you sir. I’m glad to see you were re-elected. I am confident you will continue to make positive improvements for our city. I think a parking garage for main street would be a great idea. Parking, especially during events, seems to be a problem.

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My Day Job

When I'm not doing mayor stuff, I spend my time at Gulfcoast Networking. I solve Internet issues, clean up infected computers, and build websites.
I'm always happy to take a break from computers to talk about New Port Richey's future, so feel free to come by my office at 6335 Grand Blvd to chat.